Songs For Swingin Lovers! (Limited Solid Orange Vinyl)

If In the Wee Small Hours is Frank Sinatra after midnight, Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! is the sound of the room filling up again. The melancholy has not vanished so much as been converted into momentum. Sinatra sounds buoyant, conversational and rhythmically alert, while Nelson Riddle’s arrangements keep the orchestra dancing around him rather than simply providing a luxurious backdrop.

Recorded at Capitol’s Studio A in Hollywood between October 1955 and January 1956, the album was produced by Voyle Gilmore and released on 5 March 1956. Sinatra and Riddle deliberately moved towards a hipper, jazzier, more exuberant feel after the introspection of the previous album. The song selection is a parade of American standards, but the performances avoid museum-piece reverence. “You Make Me Feel So Young”, “Pennies from Heaven”, “Love Is Here to Stay” and “Anything Goes” all depend on Sinatra’s extraordinary command of phrasing: he can sit behind the beat, rush a line for comic effect or make a familiar lyric suddenly sound like casual speech.

The centrepiece is arguably “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”, where Riddle’s arrangement builds patiently from restraint towards a famous instrumental crescendo without losing Sinatra at the centre. Elsewhere, “Old Devil Moon”, “Makin’ Whoopee” and “I Thought About You” show how much variety can exist inside the album’s apparently consistent mood. A slower recording of “Memories of You” was made during the sessions but left off, helping preserve the record’s forward motion.

Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! became the first album ever to top the UK Albums Chart and was later inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Those accolades make sense, but its vitality is more persuasive than its status. The album’s great trick is to make formidable technique sound sociable. Sinatra is never merely showing what he can do; he makes the listener feel as if the song has occurred to him in the moment, and the orchestra happens to know exactly where he is going.